Will the IONIQ be ICONIC_ _ 2022 Hyundai IONIQ 5 Review

Now, this is something a little different. An all-electric hatchback with supercar levels of power and the kind of design that has me thinking of the Lancia Delta Integrale. But that's not a Lancia. No, it's a Hyundai. Specifically, it's the 2022 Hyundai IONIQ 5. Now, before we get into who this car is for, how it stands up to the competition, and whether or not you should go buy one today, let me first say welcome. If you're new to the CarGurus YouTube channel, please hit that subscribe button. We'd love for you to stick around. You should also know that you can now sell your car 100% online with CarGurus. Just enter some information, and we'll provide you with the best offer sourced from thousands of dealers. Get an offer, have your car picked up, get paid. It's that easy. But let's get back to this. We've seen the IONIQ name before, but this IONIQ is a little different. This is the first in Hyundai's new line of IONIQ EVs, with the IONIQ 6 sedan and the IONIQ 7 SUV coming down the pike. The IONIQ 5 shares parts with the Kia EV6 that Cliff reviewed earlier. They ride on the same eGMP platform, use the same motors, and the same battery. But one look at the two cars makes it clear. They've got their own unique personalities. Hyundai is defining the future of automotive design. This is very geometric. It's all straight lines, which sort of hides the natural bubble shape of the car's silhouette. I mean, look at this big diagonal crease along the profile, and then we have these accent lines along the bottom edge of the door. I personally don't love every design decision here. I mean, for instance, for some reason there's no rear windshield wiper, but all told, I cannot deny that this car is distinctive, and it is not derivative. The lights are the real showpieces on the IONIQ 5. Hyundai calls these parametric pixel lighting elements. They look like something from Tron. The wheel designs are sharp and busy, with complementing fender arches. And notice how far Hyundai has pushed these to the edges of the vehicle. This car, this hatchback-looking EV, has a longer wheelbase than the three-row Hyundai Palisade. It's the longest wheelbase of any U.S. production Hyundai ever. The design will catch your eye, but admittedly the paint colors are a bit muted. Teal, blue, white, black, gray. At least it's not all shades of silver. The door handles, they sit flush with the bodywork until I get close with the proximity key. And then they auto-extend like I'm Tony Stark driving a Hyundai. Not an Audi, a Hyundai. Inside the IONIQ 5, there's enough wide open spaces that Susan Gibson might write a song about it. Comment below if you get that joke. I really like how the doors have this interior sculpting gives me a little extra room for my arms, and the windows let in a lot of light despite the IONIQ 5's high belt line. And there's no jumbled center console because this big dual-screen dash lends a really clean look. It all feels very airy. The climate controls are all haptic, which I don't love, but they're also very logical. Below them we have this big bin for whatever. Most of your storage is going to be in this center console, which because we're in the trim, slides back and forth. You still get a center console in the lower SE and SEL trims, but it doesn't slide. Another feature that's standard on the Limited but not available on the SE or SEL is this big glass panoramic sunroof, which is really cool. And even cooler, it has a cover that slides in both directions. It's like the spaceship in Independence Day. Thanks no doubt to the ridiculous wheelbase, there's pretty decent legroom in the rear seats. Trunk space measures 27.2 cubic feet behind the second row, 59.3 with that row folded, plus there's a .85 cubic foot frunk under the hood. Those are decent numbers, very similar to the Ford Mustang Mach-E, but a bit less than the Volkswagen ID.4. Compared to some gas-powered crossovers, it's in line with the Mazda CX-5 but way short of the Hyundai Tucson. The front seats are comfortable, if not remarkable, and there's this weird footrest thing under the driver's seat, which I never actually got into a comfortable position, but no matter. One thing that I noticed almost immediately upon sitting down is that there's a Hyundai logo on the steering wheel in this car. In fact, once you're in the driver's seat of an IONIQ 5, well, there's really no indication that you're driving a Hyundai anywhere. Definitely one of the weirdest features in this car is this board to the left of the driver display. It's magnetic, but it's not a strong enough magnet to, like, hold up your phone. You can literally just maybe hold up a photo with a refrigerator magnet, and that is such a low-tech feature in an otherwise high-tech-feeling car, it just makes me want to say, like, what is this actually for? Also, how does it drive? Well, it's actually really, really fun. I mean, this thing can hustle despite its massive weight. In fact, the weight kind of adds to the entertainment of the whole thing. You can feel it toss its weight around, but there's so much power, it's fun rather than unwieldy. And the suspension handles potholes decently, and you can feel a noticeable change in throttle dynamics when you switch between Eco, Normal, and Sport driving modes. That said, this Drive Mode button, it should be a dial. It looks like a dial, but every time I rotate it, it doesn't go, and I get frustrated. Then I remember, oh, Matt, you have to push it. You also may need to take some time to get used to the shifter. It rotates forward and backward, and it's not immediately intuitive. Overall, the IONIQ 5 delivers a terrific EV driving experience. It is whisper quiet, startlingly fast, and it actually handles pretty well. I mean, it rolls a little bit through the corners, but not as much as you'd expect given its 4,600-pound weight. Now, this car is loaded with interesting quirks and features, but one of the more interesting ones is what's called vehicle-to-load, or V-to-L charging. Basically, what that means is that you can plug in and power devices using the IONIQ 5's battery. There's a power outlet below the rear seats on our test car, but you can also get a converter that attaches to the charging port on the car's rear quarter. With the interior plug, you can power devices when the car is on, but if you use that adapter on the exterior plug, you can charge stuff whether the car's on or off. Hyundai sells the IONIQ 5 in three trims—SE, SEL, and Limited. There are two powertrain options across each trim—a rear-wheel drive model and an all-wheel drive one. With rear-wheel drive, you get a single 168-kilowatt electric motor good for 225 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque. All-wheel drive, which we're testing, pairs that 168-kilowatt rear motor with a 74-kilowatt front motor. All told, that one's good for 320 horsepower and 446 pound-feet. If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. This car is quick. Now, we're going to get a little in the weeds here, so bear with me. All Hyundai IONIQ 5s, regardless of drivetrain, they get a 77.4-kilowatt-hour battery pack. Remember that number. Electrify America has partnered with Hyundai to provide unlimited 30-minute charging sessions to IONIQ customers for two years, but regardless, the majority of EV owners, they still spend the vast majority of their charging time when they're at home. With rear-wheel drive, Hyundai says the IONIQ 5 should have a 303-mile driving range. With all-wheel drive, it's 256 miles. That makes sense, because the IONIQ 5 doesn't get a bigger battery when it adds all-wheel drive, as some EVs do. So really, you're working with the same amount of juice, now powering an extra motor. 256 miles on a 77.4-kilowatt-hour battery, that comes out to about 3.3 miles per kilowatt-hour. 303 miles with the same battery comes out to about 3.9 miles per kilowatt-hour. Now, finally, it's very important to remember that these numbers assume optimum driving conditions. If you're like Cliff and you're driving that EV6 on a cold winter day, then you might not see that level of efficiency. Hyundai also displays these figures on the IONIQ 5's trip computer, how many miles you're driving per kilowatt-hour. In my opinion, this and not driving range is how we need to be looking at efficiency when it comes to electric vehicles. The EPA, they like to look at kilowatt-hours per hundred miles driven, but that feels overly complicated to me. I would personally rather know how far I can drive on a charge, rather than how much charge I need to drive a set number of miles. But you tell us in the comments, how do you think about efficiency when it comes to a vehicle like the IONIQ 5? In testing, I saw just about 3.1 miles per kilowatt-hour, which would bring me to around 240 miles of range, a bit below Hyundai's 256-mile estimate. But to be fair, I've really been flinging this thing around. Now, let's talk about charging. It should only take about 18 minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent on a 350-kilowatt charger, but good luck finding a 350 charger that actually outputs at 350 kilowatts. We tested ours on a 150-kilowatt charger that was giving us between 50 and 100 kilowatts at any given time during our session, and we saw the battery go from 59 percent to 80 percent in 21 minutes. Now, if you are to plug it in at home on a Level 2 charger, you should get a full battery in a little less than seven hours. Now, as much as I really like the way new Hyundais and Kias drive, I'm done with their approach to tech. There's a lot here, but frankly, it is a mess to sort through, particularly when you're driving. The icons all look the same, and the system is too reliant on touchscreen controls. Also, what is up with this? We have a volume knob, but then we have this switch for tuning, and I suppose the thinking here is that the switch gives you a little more control when you're scanning through radio stations, but honestly, I'd rather this just be another knob. Also, we have a wireless charging pad for your phone down below in this center console, but if you want to run Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you need to plug it in with a wire, and that wire has to go down here. So we have this cord running through the middle of our nice, wide-open space, effectively ruining that nice, wide-open, clean look, something I really liked about the interior. It's just frustrating, but thankfully, there are some positive things, some really good things going on in here. The dedicated buttons for the infotainment are nice to touch, and I love having a customizable button on the dash and the wheel. You can rapidly access seat heat, which is standard, and seat ventilation, only on the Limited trim, via this warmer button. And the digital driver info display has some customizations which visually match the forward-thinking design elements found elsewhere in the car. The Bose stereo, complete with ambient lighting, is also very clean and balanced, if not mind-blowing. There's also a lot of safety tech in here. Blind spot avoidance, rear cross-traffic alert, a backup camera, lane-keeping assist, lane-follow assist, and adaptive cruise control. All of that comes standard. If you get the Limited trim, you also get a surround-view monitor, which I love, and Hyundai's blind-spot view monitor, which I really love. A year ago, Tesla took home pretty much all the EV awards by default, but now this segment is loaded with competitors, and a lot of those competitors are really good. They're also all sorts of different shapes and sizes, so we're not stuck choosing between little beans like the first gen Nissan LEAF or the Mitsubishi i-MiEV. There's the Mustang Mach-E, the iD.4, the EV6. The second-gen LEAF doesn't look too bad, and the upcoming Nissan Ariya, it looks flat-out good. And on the luxury end, we've got the Polestar 2, the Mercedes EQS, the Volvo XC40 Recharge. You have options. The 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 starts at $44,895, including a $1,245 destination fee, and honestly, that sounds pretty compelling after you factor in the tax incentives. But our Limited all-wheel-drive tester? Well, this one comes in at $56,340, again, including the destination fee, and that well, that feels like a lot. I mean, the incredibly plush and huge Palisade calligraphy? Well, that starts at $47,040. So the Ioniq 5 isn't a bargain. It's just not. But it can also go head-to-head with the competition, all of which also cost roughly that same price. And believe me, if I knew I wanted an EV and I had the means to make it work, I would go with one like this. Because the Limited all-wheel-drive Ioniq 5 and its $56,000 price tag, well, it doesn't just look like the future. It has the features like the cool roof and the sliding console and the great safety tech to make it feel like the future, too. Thank you so much for watching. We want to hear from you in the comments section below. And remember to subscribe to the channel, and then head over to CarGurus.com and read our full written review of the 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5. We'll see you next time.